We’ve stopped.

I think we’re stuck here.

This is probably the only time I’ve ever been happy about being stuck at the railway station!

This blog post covers 21st to 27th  August, in Ravenshoe, QLD.

This whole week has been spent at the Ravenshoe Railway Caravan Park. At just $10 per night for an unpowered site, it gave us the chance to catch up on some blog posts, take our time seeing some of the many waterfalls in the area, and probably most importantly, stay somewhere that wasn’t costing us an arm and a leg.

So this week was all about the waterfalls and battery power. (Notice a common theme here?)

The Waterfalls

This area is called the Atherton Tablelands and there are some really nice waterfalls to drive to and some that you can swim in.

We started with the popular Millaa Millaa Falls, this is one of the most photographed waterfalls in all of Australia. You may have seen ads where the beautiful girl is in the water in front of the waterfall and flicks her hair creating an arc of water around her (I think it might be the ad for Herbal Essence shampoo?). Now everyone recreates that scene…

I really wanted to add my own version of this scene for you… but we were there early morning and I wasn’t in the mood for getting cold and wet at that time of the day.

So you get a selfie of us instead…

And, well, since we’re in selfie mode, here’s all the other waterfalls we visited that day and in the next couple of days.

Had enough of the waterfall selfies? Yeah, thought so…

Battery Power

I’ve kinda lost track of all the things we’ve done to try and get ourselves battery power that will last longer than one day. While we were in Ravenshoe we took a drive up to Atherton, the nearest big town, and bought another battery, this time an AGM battery.

This is so that we could put the fridge in the back of the car, as well as the battery, and charge the battery off the car while we’re driving. (We couldn’t put the lead acid battery inside the car because as they’re charging they emit a toxic gas, apparently. You know, the kind that can kill you. :-O)

This would mean that our battery would be charging every time we drive so it would stay topped up, and we could leave the fridge connected to it. So therefore we would have a fully charged battery all the time to run the fridge and we could just leave the fridge in the car.

Umm yeah, about that…

The new battery wasn’t charging enough from the car, we’re not sure why so we’ll have to get an auto electrician to check it out for us (oh yeah, cos I really wanna spend more money on our power set-up… NOT). In the meantime we make sure we have powered sites to get us through.

It’s the fridge…

Without a doubt, the biggest factor in all this is that our fridge is one power hungry mo-fo. Having a freezer is a definite drain on our battery power, she sucks the volts out of the battery like a teenage boy vacuums up cereal for his after school snack. She is hungry.

So we’d save a lot of our power dramas if we just got rid of the fridge/freezer and down-sized to a fridge only. Or it would be great if we could turn the freezer portion off or make both sections a fridge only. (But we can’t, you can’t turn the freezer section off, nor can you make it a fridge as the highest temperature on the freezer section is -5°C.)

BUT… oh man, I love having the freezer. Now that we’re in the hot weather we can (and do) freeze bottles of water which we sip on throughout the day. That has been a life saver for me to make sure I don’t get dehydrated. And we use the frozen bottles of water to keep the veges in the chiller bags cool-ish.

So we plod on with our insufficient battery power.

Ravenshoe Railway Caravan Park

We really like it here, we ended up staying here for a total of nine nights.

The Ravenshoe Railway is a volunteer run company that used to have a steam train running from Ravenshoe to Tumoulin once a week. It’s only 30 minutes each way and runs over high wooden trestle bridges, unfortunately a couple of those bridges are now in need of repair so the train doesn’t run.

However, they have made the station area into a very pleasant caravan park. The cost to stay there is $10 per night (unpowered) or $15 per night (powered). They have good ammenities and ask for a gold coin donation for the showers. There is no emptying of grey water straight onto the ground, so you have to collect it (they do provide a bucket) and empty it into the drain in the middle of the park.

The sites for caravans seem to be adequate, they’re not too jammed packed in there.

But we feel like we lucked out in the unpowered tent section, where we were up a little rise and looking out to the wooded area. It was a tiny bit windy up there, but no biggie. It was lovely to be a little bit away from everyone else though.

After our nice little interlude, where we didn’t have to pack-up or set-up the tent for a whole nine nights, it’s time to keep moving.

Camping Info

Ravenshoe Railway Caravan Park
21st – 27th August
Non-powered site – $10 per night